Each buzz on your phone is somebody else’s plan wearing a tiny red badge. Their urgency isn’t your schedule.

Notifications are designed to look like demands and are usually just requests that suited the sender’s timing. Answer all of them instantly and your day gets assembled by whoever happens to be awake and thinking of you. Urgency is a property of the message, not a fact about the world.

Turn off the badges for anything that is not a person you would drop things for. Check the rest in batches, at hours you picked. None of this makes you unreachable; it puts the ordering back in your hands.